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April 23, 2014

Gardner Center pioneers research as catalyst for ‘community youth development’

Milbrey McLaughlin is honored for her work establishing the center that forged a new way for Stanford to support at-risk children and their families.

By Jonathan Rabinovitz

Milbrey McLaughlin worked closely with John W. Gardner to establish the only center that he permitted to bear his name. (Photo by Steve Castillo)

Milbrey McLaughlin worked closely with John W. Gardner to establish the only center that he permitted to bear his name. (Photo by Steve Castillo)

A couple of decades ago, Milbrey McLaughlin, while doing research in one of the nation’s worst housing projects, noticed how certain teenagers were defying the odds: In that gritty urban neighborhood, where it was too dangerous for the delivery man to bring a pizza to the door, these students were graduating from troubled high schools — and going on to college or solid jobs.

It was an observation that not only would change how she pursued her work with underserved youth but would also encourage scholars, civic leaders, educators and policymakers in the Bay Area and nationwide to adopt a new framework for change: community youth development.

McLaughlin, who joined the Stanford Graduate School of Education faculty in 1983, recently recalled that it was common in this particular housing project for the youth to drop out of school, join gangs, get pregnant and become involved with drugs. The exceptions, however, were kids who belonged to some sort of community organization — whether it was devoted to art, sports, music, drama or some other interest. “Talk about pivot points,” McLaughlin said, referring to the impact that these groups had on teenagers’ futures. “Rather than winding up dead or in jail, these kids make it. They’re going forward and having productive lives.”

This was one in a series of findings that led McLaughlin in 2000 to launch the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford. It would aim to bring together a variety of community groups and government agencies, in addition to schools, that impact the health, emotions, social connections and safety of youth, as well as their education. It was not dedicated just to how kids did in school; it was youth-centered and dedicated to the youth sector, a new term it helped to coin.

In keeping with this new direction, the center also eschewed the traditional university-community relationship in which the university views its part as either imparting knowledge to the community or using the community to conduct its research. “The emphasis needs to be on building ‘community capacity,’ which demands a balanced partnership between the university and community,” McLaughlin said, noting that John Gardner — the center’s namesake and co-founder — felt passionately about this. “He worried about the ‘eucalyptus curtain,’” a reference to the eucalyptus groves that divide Stanford from its neighbors, she added.

On Jan. 23, a distinguished group of more than 100 scholars, educators, policy makers and community leaders gathered on the Stanford campus to mark McLaughlin’s handing off the Gardner Center’s leadership to its next faculty director, Prudence Carter, and to honor what the center has accomplished in its first 14 years.  Among those in the room were her former doctoral students, research colleagues, foundation heads and Gardner Center staff and advisory board members, all of whom could attest to how far the center had come.

One colleague mentioned how the center had helped, for instance, to establish community schools, where youth and their families can get social and health services and benefit from programming outside school hours, in Redwood City, Calif., and how it had conducted a series of studies to gauge the community schools’ impact on students’ outcomes. Another guest cited the center’s pulling together data from a variety of schools and agencies to create the Youth Data Archive, enabling local leaders, parents and researchers to gain a much more complete picture of how children in a given community are faring — and the efficacy of different programs. And there was talk of one of the center’s most recent initiatives, the effort to assist eight California school districts, with enrollment totaling more than 1 million, set new and higher standards for student success that would replace the reliance on scores from standardized tests.

“Under Milbrey’s leadership, the center has pioneered new ways of research,” Stanford University President John Hennessy told the gathering. “It has also become an incredible outreach effort for the university, as you can hear from people in Redwood City, who talk about what a difference it has made.” He called McLaughlin, the David Jacks Professor Emerita of Education and Public Policy, a “treasure,” and he recounted how shortly after assuming the Stanford presidency, he worked closely with her and John Gardner, a giant in the anti-poverty and good government efforts of the latter half of the 20th century, to establish the center.

Gardner, a Stanford alumnus, was then a consulting professor in the Graduate School of Education; he had served as President Johnson’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and was an architect of the Great Society anti-poverty initiatives. After resigning to protest the Vietnam War, he helped establish Common Cause and the Independent Sector, two of the nation’s most influential nonprofit organizations devoted to promoting civic engagement.

The center that Gardner helped to establish at Stanford is the only organization that he would permit to use his name. “I knew that John had turned down countless requests to use his name,” another speaker, Tom Ehrlich, a close friend of Gardner’s and a GSE visiting professor who was a key advisor in the center’s early years, told the crowd. “I initially wondered, ‘How was the John W. Gardner Center going to be different?’ 

“Had I known Milbrey better at the time, I would have realized how deeply she shared John’s views: that Stanford was too disconnected from communities around us, that the center’s research should be mobilized in ways that help solve pressing societal issues, and that the development of at-risk youth was prime among those issues.

“From the outset, Milbrey shared John’s vision that youth development should be viewed as a whole, and that drug use, teenage pregnancy, truancy, youth crime, and all the other problems that are so commonly viewed as unrelated challenges to youth development needed to be handled together,” said Ehrlich, a former dean of Stanford Law School and the first president of the Legal Services Corporation.

* * *

Gardner and McLaughlin were, in certain respects a natural pair. Both devoted much of their attention to the problems facing disadvantaged communities and how government and universities could best support their efforts to clear such hurdles. Two decades before they met in the late 1990s, McLaughlin was already doing work as a young scholar at the Rand Corporation that complemented what Gardner had tried to do as HEW secretary.

In remarks at the Jan. 23 event, Patrick Shields, McLaughlin’s first graduate student at Stanford and executive director of SRI Education, recalled the backlash against the Great Society programs such as Title I and Head Start in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a series of studies showed that the programs had no effect. “Conservative groups took that as evidence that we should never have invested in helping poor kids in the first place,” Shields said.  A bellwether moment, he noted, was when President Richard Nixon remarked on television, “We must stop letting wishes color our judgments about the educational effectiveness of many special compensatory programs when ... there is growing evidence that most of them are not yet measurably improving the success of poor children’s schooling.”

Shields said that McLaughlin offered an alternative hypothesis. “There is yet another interpretation that makes judgments about the effectiveness of anti-poverty interventions somewhat premature,” she wrote in 1976. “It is possible that Title I programs as they have been evaluated have never existed — that Title I has not yet been implemented as intended by reformers.”

In the ensuing years as a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, McLaughlin’s research examined whether the federal government could stimulate innovation in public schools.  She found that simply allocating federal money to states and districts in a top-down manner, with no concern for capacity or context, typically failed to produce much improvement.  But if policy makers took a different approach to implementation, they’d get different results. “There are programs that work,” she wrote, “and when they work they are marked by a focus on teacher development, classroom level assistance, teacher collaboration, teacher participation in decision making and principal support.” While she published this in 1976, this perspective has only recently become mainstream thinking, said Shields. “She was way, way ahead of her time,” he added.

A few years after joining the faculty at Stanford, McLaughlin founded and became co-director of the Center for Research on the Context of Teaching, where she and colleagues continued to flesh out how organization, culture, institutional structure and community-building among teachers could shape teaching and learning for the better. Researchers considered not only the actions of district officials and school employees, but also “non-system actors,” such as unions and Parent Teachers Associations.

During this time, McLaughlin also looked at how groups outside of schools could affect students. For one study, she and colleagues were studying three housing projects (all remain unidentified), and that work led to her observation about how participation in community organization appeared to be associated with greater success at school and positive life choices.  And it turns out that there was another leader in the field who already was well aware of the importance of community in youth development: John Gardner.

* * *

McLaughlin became closely acquainted with Gardner after he moved into an office two doors down the hall from hers in the CERAS building in the late 1990s. She soon found herself stopping by his office to chat about the troubling issues she saw in the field, especially in urban communities, and how government, at all levels, and universities might contribute. McLaughlin said that she was inspired by Gardner’s vision, which elegantly framed what she had been documenting in her research.

In a recent interview, McLaughlin recalled that the two of them discussed how everyone in the community had a responsibility to its youth — not just the schools, which often construed their role narrowly as preparing students academically for graduation and college. Their social, emotional and physical well-being couldn’t be left to religious institutions or to the market, but required that groups step beyond their respective niches and work together. The idea of affecting change in youth’s lives outside of education was not a big subject in education policy circle at that time. “People with that perspective weren’t always viewed as serious,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin was also impressed that Gardner, despite having served in the president’s cabinet as secretary of a powerful department, was skeptical of top-down change. “The role of government is to support local actions, not to dictate them,” she recalled his saying.  “He would talk about  the importance of grassroots action — and that the role of the government is to support that.” And both of them shared the view that Stanford, as well as its peers, needed to work directly and in a more responsive way with communities that were facing challenges in enabling children to reach their full potential.

Together Gardner and McLaughlin laid plans for a center that would follow these principles. It would help to harness the immense research capacity of Stanford to finding practical community-based solutions to improve youth development. The answers would be local, but it would be a model for university-community engagement nationwide. “We became conspirators,” McLaughlin said.

* * *

From the beginning, there were people who understood the importance of the center’s mission, and there were many who wanted to honor Gardner. The Hewlett Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, and the Walton Family Foundation among others, provided critical backing.

Unrestricted funding from such key supporters enabled ambitious and creative action such as laying the groundwork for community schools in Redwood City, setting up essential elements of the Youth Data Archive and working directly with teenagers on community building and research through a newly established program, Youth Engaged in Leadership and Learning. McLaughlin recruited a staff that had both expertise in research and experience in working with communities. These steps demonstrated that the center was committed to a new type of university-community partnership. Once the model was established, the center teamed up with private and public local groups to obtain grant funding, which allowed it to sustain and expand its initiatives.

As the center has grown, McLaughlin and her colleagues have published dozens of papers, briefs and books. She is co-editor of a book describing the center’s Youth Data Archive — From Data to Action: A Community Based Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes — which was published last year and presents case studies on how cross-agency data has been employed by researchers, school officials, and service providers in San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, and Santa Clara counties to benefit children at-risk. 
Four years earlier, she co-authored 
Between Movement and Establishment: Organizations Advocating for Youth, which analyzes the successes and failures of attempts by  youth advocacy organizations to affect change in a fragmented urban policy environment. 

While the Gardner Center began its efforts in Redwood City — and continues to support projects there — it gradually established partnerships with other communities in the Bay Area and beyond. It is now, for instance, the research and evaluation partner on a $30 million federal Promise Grant to develop a continuum of family and youth services in the Mission District Neighborhood in San Francisco. Statewide there is the work under way with eight school districts to pioneer new standards for evaluating students’ progress. And nationally, in conjunction with the Gates Foundation and two other research institutes, the center is now rolling out a detailed program to help school districts ensure that their students graduate high school and then go on to succeed in college. The College Readiness Indicator System project, also called CRIS, is the culmination of a several years of work by McLaughlin and colleagues. She’s planning to continue to work on it as well as continuing a number of other projects. And she’s already starting another.

At the recent interview, she mentioned that she was about to travel to the Midwest to speak with a community leaders and individuals who were  involved with the work she had done at that housing projects some 25 years ago. More data about what happened to the youth has been gathered, and it appears that there’s still more to be said about the effects that their involvement in community groups had on their lives.

“There is an incredible story yet to be told,” said McLaughlin, who is considering whether it’s the subject of her next book.

Contact

Jonathan Rabinovitz, Director of Communications, Stanford Graduate School of Education: 650-724-9440, jrabin@stanford.edu

 

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